| News | Features | Interviews |
| Blog | Contact | Editorials |
| Which Linux Distro is Best? |
| By Howard Fosdick on 2012-10-22 04:51:10 |
| Here's a topic guaranteed to start controversy. Which Linux distribution is best? It all depends on your criteria for judging. Even then the topic is highly subjective. Here are a few nominees for "best distro" in specific categories. |
|
| Best Linux distro |
| By WorknMan on 2012-10-22 04:58:54 |
| My favorite Linux distro is Android. Wait, does that count? :) |
 - Score: 8 |
| Comment by MOS6510 |
| By MOS6510 on 2012-10-22 05:07:13 |
| Slackware and Debian. |
| - Score: 12 |
| RE: Best Linux distro |
| By darknexus on 2012-10-22 05:15:10 |
|
> My favorite Linux distro is Android. Wait, does that count? :) I'll second that. It's the only one that has actually gotten anywhere with the non-techies. |
| - Score: 3 |
| Best |
| By Elv13 on 2012-10-22 05:26:23 |
|
The best one is the one where you are ready to invest your time learning it. As long as you don't, then there is no best one. For me, nothing beat Gentoo. As a developer, I love the extra flexibility and how compiling software, something I do all day long, is so part of the core philosophy. I also like Debian a lot. http://ompldr.org/vZnozNQ Edited 2012-10-22 05:36 UTC |
| - Score: 6 |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux. |
| By sergio on 2012-10-22 05:42:34 |
|
RHEL is what I like for business, I recommend it to customers and I work with it every day. I think It's the most business friendly linux out there (and IMHO the only "sane" Linux distro on par with commercial Unix offerings). For personal use, I prefer FreeBSD or Mac OS X. Linux is a PITA, I only use it when somebody pays me for doing that! xD |
| - Score: 7 |
| In this order |
| By zaine_ridling on 2012-10-22 05:43:13 |
|
My two cents: (1) openSUSE for ease of installation, use, and KDE integration. The fact that openSUSE slowed releases to every 9 months, but even then won't release a version until it's ready is worth the wait. (2) Fedora. Always had a soft spot for Fedora because every other version rocks. __________________________ (3) ChromeOS. Sure, it's Google, but with a Chromebox/book, it's really an extremely efficient little OS that constantly gets better. Just wish Google would make it easier to install on any other machine. (4) Android. Closed, but its speed and simplicity are unbeatable. |
| - Score: 2 |
| Gentoo |
| By WereCatf on 2012-10-22 05:55:00 |
|
My favorite is Gentoo, even after all these years. Sure, compiling stuff, tweaking all the config files, fixing the occasional broken compiles and so on is a major hassle at best and at worst it's enough to cause suicidal tendencies. But still, it's the most flexible distro of all as it can be tailored to almost any need whatsoever; you can harden the whole thing all the way from the bottom if you're paranoid, you can leave out printing, X, and so on if you just need console, you can include everything and the kitchen sink if you feel like it, and so on. I use Gentoo on my server because I got tired with both Ubuntu and Fedora crapping all over themselves every now and then, and I especially hated how they insisted on replacing the changes I made to various config-files and scripts. Gentoo, on the other hand, doesn't try to override anything I've done and it works wonderfully as a server. On a similar note I've installed Gentoo on my N900 just to make a point to someone: Gentoo was very, very snappy on it and you could run SSH+Transmission (with 2 active torrents)+Web-interface for it+Samba server+Mumble with 4 users all simultaneously on it and you still had 40% CPU left -- quite a good example of how powerful the N900 still can be, and how well Gentoo can be made to fit such devices. On the desktop I really have no favorite Linux-distro, however, as they all seem to come with all kinds of annoying shortcomings of their own, and then there's the simple fact that not all of my stuff has Linux-support anyways. Mostly I just use Ubuntu in a VM if I need something. |
| - Score: 4 |
| Comment by wigry |
| By wigry on 2012-10-22 06:06:52 |
|
I love Slackware buyt started to think about it another day, why? Well Slack is not the easiest nor most user friendly distro out there but the administration is absolutely hassle free. So if you want to make sure, your system is maintainable and easy to configure then yes Slack is a good option. If you want user friendliness however then there are other options. At work we have an option to use Ubuntu but I've scared away because there are countless tools for configuration and there are not those familiar config files on well-known places so I really don't feel comfortable using Ubuntu because if I need to tweak it to my taste then I probably spend lots of time and frustration finding the right places. So it all comes down to fact, what are your expectations and what are you familiar with. I've learned Slackware and I am probably too lazy to learn anything else. |
| - Score: 3 |
| Oh God |
| By Soulbender on 2012-10-22 06:41:22 |
| Please don't even go there. |
| - Score: 7 |
| Oversimplification. |
| By spiderman on 2012-10-22 06:53:40 |
| This article is an oversimplification. The categories overlap. Nobody is looking for "the most popular distro" or for "the most user friendly distro" or for the "best live disto". People are looking for a distro that is popular AND user friendly AND live. |
| - Score: 5 |
| News | Features | Interviews |
| Blog | Contact | Editorials |